


pretending you're not still the one

by hrhrionastar



Category: Legend of the Seeker
Genre: D'Hara Fest, Episode: s02e20 Eternity, Episode: s02e22 Tears, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 18:05:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hrhrionastar/pseuds/hrhrionastar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no Spell of Undoing. Confession cleanses Cara’s body of Darken Rahl’s Underworld magic, but can do nothing to banish him—or their son—from her mind. Also, saving the world is becoming urgent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pretending you're not still the one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brontefanatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brontefanatic/gifts).



> **Prompt** : D/C, “I lied. He’s alive.” Darken and Cara’s son.

“We go in. We get the Stone of Tears. We get out,” says Richard. He’s kneeling next to Cara behind a bush.  
  
They can see through the leaves, to the Mord’Sith temple where Darken Rahl tortured and broke Cara with Underworld-tainted dark magic until she turned on her friends and stole the Stone of Tears out of Zedd’s hands and brought it back here to her former master.  
  
The Mord’Sith temple looks abandoned. There aren’t any guards in front of the doors. There aren’t even any guards where Richard and Cara are hiding behind the bush, even though they’re within a few yards of the entrance.  
  
Maybe Darken Rahl has already left the temple.  
  
Even if he has, Cara won’t stop until she hunts him down. There is no revenge terrible enough for what he did to her.  
  
Also, without the Stone of Tears the Seeker can’t save the world. So they’ll all die. The Underworld-tainted agiel magic and the pure whiteness of Confession (like a deadly blizzard) that fought it out to the last square inch of Cara’s soul before annihilating one another, will have done so for nothing.  
  
“There is a chance,” Zedd had admitted reluctantly, “that Confession won’t kill her. If Kahlan can calibrate her touch to the precise amount necessary to combat Rahl’s dark magic…”  
  
“You can’t calibrate Confession,” Kahlan had said. But she’d tried anyway.  
  
So now Cara is here next to Richard, herself again. Mostly.  
  
“Cara,” says Richard, looking over at her with concern in his big brown eyes. “Are you okay?”  
  
Cara doesn’t answer.  
  


* * *

  
They walk straight through the front door. Cara holds one end of a chain that’s attached to a collar around Richard’s neck. She carries the Sword of Truth in her other hand. Richard’s expression is suitably betrayed—in fact, it’s verging on a pout—but Cara is having more trouble maintaining her own role. She thinks pretending to be the Princess of Thryce was easier than her present deceit.  
  
She swaggers past four other Mord’Sith, who line the walls holding candles. The fifth one trips her.  
  
Cara lets go of the chain around Richard’s neck and rolls into the cavernous main room. Darken Rahl is standing in the middle of the space, his feet firmly planted. Cara can’t stop her roll. Her shoulder hits his left knee.  
  
“Cara,” Darken says, looking down at her with both eyebrows raised, “how kind of you to bring me the Seeker.”  
  
That’s when the five Mord’Sith blow their candles out.  
  
There is still plenty of light coming in through the arrow slits on the walls. Cara does a one-handed backflip to get away from Darken, because she’s still holding the Sword of Truth. It’s the kind of move that is really a mistake for someone who spent hours recently suspended by her wrists from the ceiling. Cara’s muscles scream in agony.  
  
Back amid the scrum of Mord’Sith by the entrance, Richard tries to barrel through them. The Mord’Sith don’t move to block him—they don’t move at all, just stand there like statues—but Richard rebounds off of some invisible surface. Apparently it’s as hard as a wall, because Cara can hear the sickening crunch as Richard’s arm breaks.  
  
Darken watches his brother injure himself on thin air, smirking. Cara takes his moment of distraction to rise to her feet. She has to use the Sword of Truth as a cane. It cuts through the leather of her right glove.  
  
“You won’t get away with this, Rahl!” screams Richard. “Give us the Stone, or—“  
  
“Or you’ll what?” says Darken. “Lecture me to death?”  
  
“Or I’ll kill you,” Cara offers. She raises the Sword of Truth to point directly at her former lord. He touches two fingers to his bottom lip, and Cara remembers all those hands have done to her and shudders. Fighting him is looking better all the time.  
  
“Actually,” she says, “Darken,” which is meant to hurt, because until Richard and Kahlan and Zedd she would’ve said Lord Rahl, and now they’ve saved her twice and him, never, “there is no or.”  
  
“I can’t beg for your forgiveness?” asks Darken. Despite his words, he reaches into his robes and pulls out the Underworld agiel and another, regular agiel.  
  
Cara swallows. She’s almost sure that the love Kahlan left burning on her nerve endings, blocked from reaching her heart only by the poison that very same Underworld agiel spread through her veins, will protect her from its unnatural power. But she’s not _certain_.  
  
She launches herself at Darken Rahl with the sword, using her lighter weight to dance in and out so he can’t pin her down with the Underworld agiel. She starts strong: her first swing cuts open Darken’s forearm. Blood trickles down the Sword of Truth, but it’s absorbed by the weapon’s magic before it can reach the hilt.  
  
Cara is strong. She is a warrior. Richard has beaten her in sparring sessions, but only when using this sword, with which, as Zedd has explained, he fights with the strength of all Seekers past. Kahlan can’t lay a hand on Cara unless she’s in the Blood Rage (and then she doesn’t need to).  
  
But the thing about fighting Darken Rahl, the thing Cara should know by now and doesn’t—is that he cheats.  
  
Cara is standing with the Sword of Truth held over her head. Darken holds it off from biting into his shoulder with the black Underworld agiel. Sparks of randomized magic fly from where the two weapons meet.  
  
“I think you will forgive me,” Darken says quietly.  
  
Cara looks across at him in disgust. She would be looking up, but she’s standing on her toes in order to slam the sword down on him, and this way they are almost nose to nose.  
  
Cara can’t imagine anything that would make her forgive Darken Rahl. Even when he had rebroken her, she hadn’t forgiven him. She had merely accepted that her life, and Dahlia’s life, and the lives of all the Mord’Sith, were his. Darken had made her feel his mastery over her in a way that Cara, at least, had never felt before. It was the triumph of greater strength, pure and simple. And even that was not enough to reconcile her to the death of her son.  
  
“Yes,” whispers Darken Rahl. “You see,” he licks his lips. A spark of magic has landed on his cheek. “I lied. He’s alive.”  
  
Cara stares at him. Her arms ache from holding up the sword, her toes are trying to dig into the floor because she’s suddenly lost her balance, and her eyes sting.  
  
Which is, of course, the moment that Darken brings up the second agiel and shoves it against Cara’s heart.  
  
She is dead before she hits the floor.  
  


* * *

  
“YOU WILL RETURN TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING AND KILL FOR ME, OR SUFFER ETERNAL TORMENT,” says a voice.  
  
Cara tosses her hair and looks warily around. There are souls everywhere. They wave their arms and try to grab onto Cara’s ankles. She stomps on someone’s spiritual fingers.  
  
“So if I kill for you and you win your war against the living, you _won’t_ make my soul suffer for all eternity?” Cara asks.  
  
“OF COURSE I WILL.”  
  
“You need to work on your recruitment pitch.”  
  
“THANKS FOR THE ADVICE, MISTRESS…UM…”  
  
“Cara,” she says, rolling her eyes. Is it just her, or does the Keeper remind anyone else of a drunk Margrave of Rothenberg?  
  
Just then there’s a tug in the vicinity of her navel. The Underworld fades into gray nothingness.  
  


* * *

  
Cara opens her eyes. Darken Rahl’s face is inches from hers.  
  
The only sane conclusion, that Darken gave her the Breath of Life, makes her head spin.  
  
“Are you secretly a Sister of the Agiel in disguise?” she says woozily. “You traitor…”  
  
Darken kisses her forehead. Then he hits her.  
  
Cara subsides gratefully back into unconsciousness.  
  


* * *

  
The next time Cara wakes up, her wrists are chained. This time they’re chained to a bed instead of to the ceiling, which Cara decides to count as an improvement. She’s lying down and comfortable, at least.  
  
At first she thinks the ceiling is weirdly slanted. Maybe Darken set up a delayed trap in the temple, and Cara and Richard are going to be crushed by falling rock. Eventually, she realizes the ceiling is slanted because she’s in a tent. The air smells salty and like rotted fish, which means Darken has either taken her to within a stone’s throw of the Pillars of Creation, or else he’s finally decided to flee to Merilandria and start a new life.  
  
Darken enters the tent. Cara can’t see him, but she knows who he is by the feel of the broken bonds between their souls. Also, he smells like expensive soap.  
  
“Where’s Richard?” asks Cara.  
  
Darken sits down on the bed. Now Cara can see that he’s found time to shave and wash his hair, although the dark circles under his eyes suggest that she’s ahead of him on sleep.  
  
“I imagine that my dear brother is, at this very moment, escaping the living cage I designed with the aid of his stalwart companions, the wizard Zeddicus and the woman who was almost my bride,” Darken says coolly. “You and I are, of course, on our way to obtain the Creator’s eternal gratitude for services rendered.”  
  
The woman who was almost his bride? Then—“How did you know?” Cara demands. She shifts on the bed, wrestling with a resurgence of her jealousy for Kahlan.  
  
“The Keeper is outside time,” Darken explains. “As His…faithful servant,” here his lips pucker, as if he doesn’t like the taste of his own statement, “I yet retain fragments of His power. And I had your words to guide me: ‘why _her_ son?’ you said, and ‘I am the last of the Mord’Sith.’”  
  
Cara shivers. She remembers a dark and abandoned temple, and Triana’s skeleton sprawled against a wall. She never wants to feel despair like that again.  
  
“You talk in your sleep,” says Darken, smirking down at her.  
  
He has to have known this before he made Cara drop her guard in the temple by saying that their son was alive. Otherwise, Darken would never have suggested begging for her forgiveness. It is only now that he knows the truth about the night in West Granthia that he can even consider putting ‘Cara’ and ‘forgiveness’ in the same sentence.  
  
So the sleep Darken is talking about must have been between the beatings with the Underworld agiel. Small wonder that Cara can’t remember her delirious ravings.  
  
“If by sleep, you mean mind-numbing torture fog,” she therefore corrects him.  
  
The Keeper is outside time. Does that mean…?  
  
“So it really happened. Somewhere,” Cara says, testing her theory. She glares accusingly at her former master. “You let it.”  
  
“You didn’t,” says Darken. His eyes have gone all soft. Cara can feel the heat of his thigh pressing against hers through her leathers. For a moment, she’s tempted.  
  
Emotion spikes in Cara’s chest. She should feel only the urge to punish, to hurt, to kill. But the softness in Darken’s eyes makes another urge race through her. She wants her hands free to comfort him instead of to throttle him.  
  
Cara can’t give in to her feelings. For the first time, she knows what Kahlan must suffer, torn in two by her duty as a Confessor and her love for Richard.  
  
When Cara doesn’t speak to him again, Darken leaves the tent. Cara squirms. The bed doesn’t feel so comfortable anymore.  
  


* * *

  
Dawn is breaking over the Pillars of Creation. The red line on the horizon must be the Midsummer sun, Cara thinks. She carefully refrains from looking around. Surely, surely Richard and Kahlan and Zedd will have caught up by now.  
  
Cara walks guarded by several of her former agiel-sisters. Her wrists are still chained. Somehow her gloves have gone missing.  
  
Garen looks particularly smug. There’s an extra fragment of red leather tucked through her belt. Cara fantasizes about strangling Garen with the stolen glove, once she’s free. Could be tricky, as a maneuver. But nothing Cara can’t handle.  
  
Darken pauses on the last dune before the long flat expanse of sand that leads to the rocky climb up to the Pillars. He closes his eyes and breathes in, savoring incipient victory like the bouquet of a fine wine.  
  
The sun rises. Its light bathes the valley of sand before them, and glints on a thousand misshapen forms. Bent, twisted limbs and eyeless faces. Here and there a rotted rag that might once have been smooth velvet or crisp Mord’Sith leather flutters in the breeze.  
  
Screelings. An army of them.  
  
Darken draws his sword—Cara catches a glimpse of the word ‘Truth’ on the hilt—and her once-sisters draw their agiels. Cara lifts the expanse of chain between the bands of metal on her wrists. It’s a desperate choice of weapon, but then, this is a desperate hour.  
  
There is one more moment of waiting, as if the screelings want someone to yell, ‘Charge!’ or, more likely, that they just want someone to move so they can see to tear apart their first victim.  
  
Then Darken whispers, “Now,” and Garen leads the Mord’Sith into battle.  
  
It’s noisy, because the screelings may look like human-shaped spiders but they hiss like snakes, and it’s bloody, because there are a thousand of them, and Garen was never that good a fighter anyway.  
  
One by one, the other Mord’Sith fall. Cara ducks and strikes with her chains and twists and nearly trips on a leather clad arm, and every second she’s fighting her way closer to the Pillars. She and Darken have long since arranged themselves back to back. They both know they are racing time.  
  
And then it happens. A screeling grabs Darken’s ankle. He goes down. Instantly more screelings leap forward and obstruct him from view.  
  
Cara screams. Her hands are golden tan blurs, whipping the chain through the air so fast it beheads the screeling on Darken’s left. He holds out his hand before another can take its place, and resting on his palm is the Stone of Tears.  
  
Cara grabs the tiny blue stone. Her nails dig into Darken’s palm and draw blood.  
  
Her last sight of Darken Rahl is of that hand disappearing under a grasping, ever-expanding crowd of screelings.  
  
Cara runs for the Pillars. The Stone of Tears feels hard and sharp in her clenched fist, just like an ordinary rock.  
  


* * *

  
Cara stands at the Pillars of Creation with her eyes closed. She doesn’t need to see the sunlight lancing down on the valley, turning the screelings to ash. She can feel it. The Creator’s Light is warm on her skin, and Cara imagines letting herself pour into it.  
  
There is so little that separates a mortal soul from the divine Light, Cara knows now. Surrendering to it would feel wonderful.  
  
Dark ropes of energy yank Cara out of her dreamy musings. They are her bonds to Darken Rahl, and they aren’t broken like she had thought. They are braided with pain, spattered with blood. But deep inside those connecting ropes that stretch between Cara’s soul and Darken’s, there is a hint of something else. Something that hums with golden power, pure and strong.  
  
Cara opens her eyes. The enhanced awareness the Creator gave her starts to fade, but the memory of it is etched on Darken’s face. Just for these few seconds, _he_ reflects _Cara_ , and not the other way around.  
  
And Cara’s soul is beautiful.  
  
She smiles, and comes around the platform where the Stone of Tears so recently acted as a purifying lens to burn away the screelings. Her chains even clink in a self-satisfied way, as she caresses Darken’s shoulder.  
  
The screelings tore into him. The wounds are closing up, as the Creator’s bounty spills over onto the undeserving world. But Darken’s robes will never be the same. Cara loves the contrast, the healthy warmth of his skin against the ragged tatters of his clothing.  
  
Darken tilts his head to follow her touch, his eyes hooded. He wants her.  
  
Cara savors the feeling between them. But she doesn’t let it stop her from hooking her chains around Darken’s neck.  
  
Cara leaps up onto Darken’s back, her legs locked tight around his waist. She pulls the chain tight across his throat, tosses her hair, and bends to whisper in his ear.  
  
“I’m glad you survived,” Cara says softly. “Now take me to my son or I’ll kill you myself.”  
  
“Our son,” Darken corrects her. He hoists her legs higher against his sides and leans his head on her shoulder to ease the burn of the chain at his neck. “It will be an honor,” he murmurs against her collarbone. “As always. Mistress Cara.”  
  


* * *

  
It is weeks later. Darken and Cara have left the Pillars of Creation far behind, but not before green shoots started poking up through the sand. Either the Creator has decided to reclaim Her space, or else screeling ash is the perfect fertilizer.  
  
Cara doubts that she’ll ever know. But it doesn’t matter. Ever since the Pillars, she sees life everywhere.  
  
Darken has led Cara on a long trek toward the heart of D’Hara. At first, she debated whether she should leave little flower blossoms to mark her trail, the way Zedd had done when Denna held him captive. But Richard at least will be able to find her.  
  
And Cara can’t say why, but she’s no longer in any hurry to be rescued.  
  
Darken stops Cara on the dusty, meandering road. There’s a bush. He pulls the leaves back, and Cara sees a field of wildflowers. A dog runs toward them through the tall plants, chased by a small boy.  
  
The boy has blond hair and a thick blade of a nose. And when Cara brushes her fingers across the hilts of her agiels (now back in her possession, where they belong) she can feel the barely vocalized screams pointing her right at the child.  
  
Cara runs through the wildflowers and sweeps the boy up into her arms. Holding him is all her hopes rewarded.  
  
The dog barks excitedly, running around them in circles. In the distance there’s a house with a white fence, and someone striding across the fields.  
  
Darken is at Cara’s shoulder now. At the sight of him, the boy suddenly becomes verbal. “Lord Rahl, Lord Rahl! Did you know I drownded?”  
  
“No!” gasps Darken, making his eyes wide. “You don’t look all wet and wrinkly! Did you see the monster at the bottom of the sea?”  
  
“No,” sighs the boy, sounding disappointed. “Addie saved me! Good girl, Addie!” he adds to the dog, who is now slobbering at Darken’s feet.  
  
 _Drowned_ , thinks Cara, _that must have been when my agiels didn’t work_ , and she lets go of her last fear that this is a dream or a trick. Her son is here, he’s real, he’s alive. She kisses his forehead, and then both cheeks for good measure.  
  
“What are you doing?” demands a new voice. It’s the figure from the house, a peasant woman, quite young, with long charcoal-colored hair and her hands on her hips. “Get away from my son!”  
  
Cara looks her aghast question at Darken, who shrugs unrepentantly. Vowing to take her revenge upon him the first chance she gets, Cara turns to do battle with the stranger for her son. She has risked too much, sacrificed too much, won too much, to fail now.  
  
‘Failure’ is a word Mistress Cara and Lord Darken Rahl simply don’t know.


End file.
